Hurricane
Shows Race and Class Decide
Who Lives and Dies in Capitalist America

Man
driven from his home by Hurricane Katrina carries unconscious boy past
National Guardsmen sealing off the Superdome in New Orleans, September
1.
(Michael Appleton/New York Daily News)

SEPTEMBER 5 – The New Orleans disaster was man-made.
It was the product of a government that defends only the property
and interests of the ruling class, and refused to make preparations for
a catastrophe
that everyone knew was coming. The horrendous suffering and
still-unknown death
toll reaching into the thousands was determined by class and race: the
rich and
white got out in their SUVs, while the poor and black, without cars and
money
and credit cards, were left to fend for themselves against the
inundation.

The destruction in the wake
of Hurricane Katrina is being called the worst natural disaster in U.S.
history. But the devastation of New Orleans was not natural, nor just
the
result of callous, criminal neglect – it was mass murder by the racist
rulers
of capitalist America. The real response to this outrage is not to call
on
criminals in power to improve preparations for the next disaster, but
to fight
for socialist revolution to bring down the system that perpetuates war,
racism
and poverty.

The numbers left stranded were
staggering, well over 100,000 trapped on rooftops, camped out on
Interstate
Highway 10, jammed into the filthy, sweltering Superdome and the chaos
of the
Convention Center. From Day One, television images showed the desperate
black
families, without food and water, the crying hungry babies, the old and
infirm
in wheelchairs expiring from dehydration and heatstroke. What the TV
didn’t
show were rings of police who kept the survivors trapped in these
hellholes, preventing
them from leaving.

Eighty
percent
of this city of 500,000 has been submerged in a flood of biblical
proportions.
But the government’s concern was not to protect the population,
two-thirds of
which is black. There were no plans – none – to evacuate the 35 percent
of the
population that was too old or too poor to be able to move. There were
no plans
to evacuate patients from public hospitals, where the destitute are
treated, although
wealthy private hospitals hired helicopters and buses. By Wednesday,
police
were ordered to stop searching for survivors and to focus on stopping
looting.

Only on the fifth day were
buses brought in to evacuate the victims. This took place just as
President
Bush whisked through New Orleans, avoiding any areas where he might
encounter
angry survivors. State Police and National Guard SWAT teams bristling
with
weapons rode through the city atop armored personnel carriers, acting
like they
were in occupied Iraq. In fact, the occupation of New Orleans resembled
nothing
so much as the U.S. takeover of Baghdad. While the government
(including Louisiana
state and New Orleans city officials) and the media kept braying about
“looting,”
which was mainly the desperate population scavenging for food and
drink, the authorities
stood by and did nothing, day after day.

How the Racist Media
Portray New Orleans Disaster

The hue and cry over
looting is a classic racist ploy. A set of two
nearly identical AP pictures is circulating on the Internet: the
caption of one
shows a white couple wading through water after “finding bread and soda
from a
local grocery store,” while the second shows a young black man “after
looting a
grocery store.” Other photos show New Orleans police officers joining
in the
“free for all” and National Guard soldiers in uniform “shopping” for
supplies
in storm-battered Wal-Mart stores. Meanwhile, Bush’s capitalist buddies
at
Enron and Halliburton have been looting the entire country, siphoning
off millions
in fictitious billing and destroying billions of dollars of workers’
pensions!

Millions around the globe saw
searing pictures of crowds of poor and black flood victims crying out
“Help,
help, help,” while columns of buses were parked on the highways ten
miles away. The New
Orleans Times-Picayune
(4 September) reported:

“Witnesses said a small riot broke out
Wednesday when refugees saw
rescuers in big trucks carting off white tourists by the dozens,
leaving many
black people to fend for themselves. ‘You should have seen them
gathering up
white folks,’ said Kim Jackson, 39. ‘They had a big 18-wheeler with the
National Guard walking alongside them. ... But they got us here like
dogs’.”

Now a political firestorm has broken out in
Washington
over the
“slow pace” of the government’s response. Black Democrats and even some
Southern Republicans blasted the Bush White House. But at bottom, it’s
not
about speed, or priorities, or even money. It’s about an inhuman system
of
exploitation in which the owners of capital grow rich off the labor of
the toilers
who from the time of chattel slavery have been considered “expendable”
by the
arrogant boss man.

“No One Can Say They
Didn’t See It Coming”

As the
145-mile-an-hour winds of Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf
Coast on Monday morning, August 29, it was classified as a Category 4
storm,
lower than the Category 5 storm that had been predicted. The eye of the
storm
passed east of New Orleans instead of hitting the city directly as
feared. Yet
by Monday evening, the low-lying areas north and east of the high
ground along
the Mississippi River embankment and the tourist destination of the
French
Quarter were under water. Incredibly, federal engineers did not realize
that
there had been a major breach of the flood barriers until they read
about it on
Internet web logs the next morning!

Later, the
head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Michael Brown,
a Bush
political appointee who previously ran the International Arabian Horse
Association,
said FEMA didn’t know about more than 15,000 thirsty, starving, dying
flood
survivors in the New Orleans Convention Center until Thursday, after
days of
reporting on TV.

“No one can say they didn't see
it coming,” wrote the New Orleans Times-Picayune (30 August),
in an
article on how “Feds’ Disaster Planning Shifts Away From Preparedness.”
For
years, Gulf Coast officials had been warning about the dire need for
hurricane
protection, including building up levees and repairing barrier islands.
In
early 2001, FEMA issued a report listing the three most likely
disasters as a
massive earthquake in San Francisco, a hurricane hitting New Orleans
and a
terrorist attack on New York City. “The New Orleans hurricane scenario
may be
the deadliest of all,” wrote the Houston Chronicle (1 December
2001) in
an article titled, “Keeping Its Head Above Water: New Orleans Faces
Doomsday
Scenario.”

The next year,
National Public Radio (20 September 2002) broadcast a
major piece on the danger of a hurricane hitting New Orleans. It
interviewed
Walter Maestri, in charge of emergency management for Jefferson Parish,
who
said they had held an exercise to estimate the effects of a Category 5
storm.
After it was over, he wrote on the simulation map, “KYAGB: Kiss Your
Ass
Goodbye. It was body bag time. We think 40,000 people could lose their
lives.”
Despite the warnings, nothing was done. Last year, Maestri told the New
Orleans Times-Picayune (8 June 2004): “It appears that the money
has been
moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war
in
Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy
that the
levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make
the case
that this is a security issue for us.”

Following
the 11 September
2001 attack on NYC’s World Trade Center, the federal government
drastically
curtailed planning for natural disasters to focus on “terrorism.” FEMA
was
absorbed into the Homeland Security Department. NBC-TV (2 September)
reported
that last year an exercise was held on a hypothetical “Hurricane Pam”
which was
almost an exact preview of what happened in Katrina: 120-mph winds,
massive
storm surges, 20 feet of water in New Orleans, 80 percent of the
buildings
damaged, hundreds of thousands stranded, refugees on rooftops, gunfire
slowing
rescue operations. A Louisiana State University hurricane expert, Ivor
van
Heerden, said that U.S. Army “Corps of Engineers people in the back of
the room
giggled” when the researchers presented the information.

Partial detail from
June 2002 Times-Picayune diagram
of New Orleans levees. Note that break occurred at lowest point
of floodwall on 17th Street canal.

Speaking with
ABC-TV’s Diane Sawyer, president Bush claimed that “I don’t think
anyone
anticipated the breach of the levees.” Like Condoleezza Rice’s claim
about 9-11
that “I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people
would take
an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center,” this is a
bald-faced lie.
Repeated studies showed that the floodwalls would be breached by any
powerful
storm. Plans to raise the barriers higher were delayed as the
administration
slashed flood control programs for New Orleans by 60 percent last year.
As a
map in a five-part Times-Picayune (23-27 June 2002) series
shows, the
place on the 17th Street Canal where the floodwall was breached is
precisely
where it was the lowest, barely 10 feet above sea level. Katrina
produced surges
much higher than that in Lake Pontchartrain.

So they knew exactly what would
happen in a major storm, and did nothing to prevent catastrophic
damage. As far
as protecting the population is concerned, the only preparation was New
Orleans
mayor Ray Nagin’s call two days before the storm hit to evacuate the
city. Yet
the same Times-Picayune series reported that “100,000 people
without
transportation will be especially threatened” if New Orleans were hit
by “the
Big One.” In spite of this, neither the city, state or federal
governments did
anything to dispatch the 2,000 buses that would be needed to get such a
huge
population out of harm’s way. They consciously left the poor,
overwhelmingly
black population there to die. It was a classic capitalist “solution”
going
back to the Georgia slave-era proverb: “Every man for himself, and the
devil
take the hindmost.”

In the aftermath, the survivors of
Hurricane
Katrina have been held prisoner in the flooded city. It should not be
forgotten
that Louisiana is Klan country. In addition to the shotgun-wielding
cops
ringing the sports arenas, when exhausted black New Orleans residents
trudged
over the Crescent City Connection, trying to get out by crossing the
bridges
west to Jefferson Parish, the only escape route was cut off by
officials with
guns and dogs. Jefferson is a white flight suburb, a hotbed of racist
reaction
which in 1989 elected fascist David Duke, the neo-Nazi “Klan in a
suit,” to the
state legislature. The racist blockade preventing survivors from
reaching the
West Bank of the Mississippi shows again that the Louisiana disaster
was political,
not “natural.”

The
horror of New Orleans has deeply shaken the country. Complacent
liberals act as
if they have suddenly seen the face of hell, “right here in River
City.” Even
some of the servile bourgeois media, who acted as shameless PR men and
women
for the Pentagon when they were “embedded” with the imperialist
invaders in
Iraq, showed apocalyptic scenes from New Orleans as Bush was
proclaiming that
FEMA head “Brownie” was “doing a heck of a job.” A round-up by the New
York
Times (4 September) commented:

“New
Orleans,
Flannery O’Connor once wrote, is a place where the devil’s existence is
freely
recognized.

“But not this devil. Not the devil of bloated bodies
floating in muddy waters washing lazily over submerged pickups and
campers, of
corpses being eaten by rats as they decomposed on city streets, of
people dying
in wheelchairs outside the convention center as friends poured water
over their
heads to try to keep them alive.”

Mayor
Nagin, a “maverick” bourgeois politico, warned “if I
don’t get the help I need this city is going to blow up and this is
going to be
a national disgrace.”

Suddenly, the press is
reporting that what was exposed in New Orleans was
not just a broken levee, but a “cleavage of race and class, at once
familiar
and startlingly new, laid bare in a setting where they suddenly
amounted to
matters of life and death,” as Times reporter Jason DeParle
wrote. With
the images of impoverished black people staring viewers in the face,
the voice
of the capitalist “establishment” discovered that “28% of people in New
Orleans
live in poverty,” more than triple the national average, and “of those,
84% are
black.” New Orleans looked like Port-au-Prince, Haiti, they said, or
Somalia.
Or it could become like Los Angeles in 1992, after the acquittal by a
lily-white jury of the white cops who beat black motorist Rodney King.
Or like
Newark, Detroit or Washington, which all burned in the “race riots”
(actually,
ghetto upheavals) of the 1960s. Or more recently, Cincinnati in the
spring of
2001.

“What
happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore –
and then run? ...
“Maybe it just sags,
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?”

Now
that the Big One has hit, the ruling class is worried
that the Big Easy could blow.

Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

As has frequently
happened through the ages, a natural phenomenon,
Hurricane Katrina, laid bare the fault lines between the classes in a
rotting,
decaying society. We noted in our special issue on the Asian tsunami
disaster
(“Capitalist Tidal Wave of Death,” The Internationalist No. 20,
January-February
2005) that the vast majority of the quarter million who perished in
that
calamity died because they were poor and vulnerable, forced to live in
precarious conditions on the edge of a punishing sea. In New Orleans
today,
black poor and working people resided in the basin below sea level
where the
canals were breached. They live from paycheck to paycheck, from
disability,
social security and welfare checks, and couldn’t leave because the
hurricane
hit before the end of the month when the check comes. Even if they had
a car,
many did not have $40 to buy a tank of gas, so they stayed to face the
wrath of
Katrina, and several thousand died.

Hurricane
Katrina survivor confronts soldier demanding answers to why food has
not come for him and everyone at the New Orleans Convention Center
Friday, September 2.
(Photo: Richard Alan/The Advocate)

The fury of the hurricane
survivors against the government, as one TV newscaster remarked, is
that of
people who don’t just feel “neglected” since August 29. They toil under
the
burden of several hundred years of slavery, almost a century of Jim
Crow
segregation, and a grinding poverty that has never let up. The
thousands
crammed into the stinking New Orleans Superdome, who never could have
afforded
the $90 a seat tickets when it was a sports arena, felt like they were
in the
hold of a slave ship, as Jesse Jackson remarked. Of course, black
Democrat
Jackson then turns around and tells the grandchildren of slaves the lie
that
“the hands that picked cotton will pick a president” ... by voting for
Dixiecrats like Bill Clinton. Clinton is helping Bush do political
damage
control and touring with George Bush I calling for charity
contributions, swindling
working people while providing a juicy tax break for the capitalists.

Slavery was the economic
foundation on which U.S. capitalism was built, and its effects still
permeate
American society. All the more so in New Orleans, which was annexed by
the
United States from France in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, greatly
extending the
sway of the slavocracy. In the early 19th century, New Orleans was a
center of
the slave trade. Controlling it was crucial to U.S. rulers, because the
products of slave labor were shipped down the Mississippi and exported
through
the port of New Orleans. Back then, the black population was kept in
shacks in
the bottom lands that lie below sea level, while the grand mansions of
the
white aristocracy lined St. Charles Avenue. The relatively large number
of free
blacks gave rise to the multicultural heritage that is to this day the
trademark of New Orleans, the city that was the birthplace of jazz
music and
home of the Mardi Gras. But in the rich cultural mix, black people were
always
on the bottom economically, and geographically. The state is a paradise
of
plunder and corruption for oil and agribusiness companies, together
with
Democrat and Republican politicians who feed at the trough. Their
wealth and
power are based on ruthless exploitation of the black and white
laboring poor.

The St. Petersburg
Times (4 September) writes that “many black
people in New Orleans, believed the city purposefully broke the levy
that
flooded their neighborhood so the famous French Quarter and white areas
of town
could be spared.” They may think that because the capitalist rulers of
New
Orleans did it before. During the Mississippi River flood in the spring
of
1927, the business community decided to dynamite the levee at Poydras,
just
below the city, flooding out St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes and
ruining
small farmers. For this the bankers enlisted the support of Republican
president Calvin Coolidge, who named a commission headed by Herbert
Hoover.
Throughout the Mississippi Delta, blacks by the thousands were
press-ganged to
shore up the levees, forcibly held in work camps under armed guard,
beset by
Klan night-riders. When a black worker refused to submit to this slave
labor,
he was shot by a cop, triggering a strike and unrest in the camps (John
Barry, Rising
Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America
[Simon
& Schuster, 1997]).

The victims of Hurricane
Katrina are enraged because they know it doesn’t have to be this way.
In a
society organized for human needs rather than for the profits sweated
out of
the misery of the masses, natural disasters can be prepared for and
their
effect mitigated. Just across the Caribbean in Cuba, where capitalism
was abolished
after the Revolution of 1959, hurricanes are an annual affair, yet few
are
killed by them. In 2001, when Hurricane Michelle, a Category 4 storm,
lashed
the island with 125-mph winds, 700,000 people were evacuated and five
died. In
September 2004, while Hurricane Jeanne killed up to 4,000 people in
U.S.-occupied Haiti, the even stronger Category 5 Hurricane Ivan
pummeled
western Cuba, but nobody was killed, even though the storm destroyed up
to
20,000 homes. This feat was achieved by evacuating 1.9 million people,
housing
three-quarters of them in other people’s homes, while the remainder
found
refuge in 2,500 shelters; 1,725 kitchens, staffed by food workers from
Havana,
were set up by the government to feed the evacuees.

This shows what can be
accomplished by a collectivized economy where such urgent tasks of
meeting human
needs are not blocked by capitalist private property, even though the
government
of Fidel Castro is a bureaucratic regime. Today, Cuba has offered to
send teams
of doctors, experienced in disaster relief, to New Orleans. The U.S.
government,
which has economically blockaded the island for 45 years in its frenzy
to
strangle the revolution, has refused to acknowledge the offer.
Meanwhile,
Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, a bourgeois nationalist allied
with Castro’s
Cuba who has been a thorn in the side of the Bush regime, has offered
to
provide $1 million in disaster aid and cheap heating oil to poor
communities in
the U.S. through the Citgo chain of refineries and gas stations that it
owns.
Revolutionaries defend the Cuban deformed workers state and Venezuela
against
U.S. imperialism, and call for their offers of aid to be accepted.

The capitalist rulers’ response
to Hurricane Katrina is part and parcel of the racist oppression that
is
endemic in the United States and has been escalating in the wake of the
U.S. invasion/occupation
of Iraq and Afghanistan. This is part of the reason why it is vital to
fight in
defense of the Iraqi and Afghan peoples and for the defeat of U.S.
imperialism.
While dead bodies are stacked in hospital corridors and at airport
counters and
float through the flooded streets of New Orleans, the medical examiner
in
Tucson, Arizona is using a refrigerated tractor-trailer to hold the
overflow of
bodies of immigrant workers who died in the desert after crossing the
border
from Mexico in search of a better life. More than 200 “illegal
immigrants” have
been killed in this way in Arizona alone during the past year, while
anti-immigrant fascists set up “Minutemen” vigilante patrols to hunt
them down.
Meanwhile, racist politicians rail that undocumented immigrants must
not be
given any flood relief – that is, they can work and die, but not get
what they
need to live. The fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants
and for
workers defense squads to smash the racist vigilantes is crucial for
the entire
working class.

Much of the left in the United
States has joined with liberals in clamoring for the federal government
to
provide “money for refugees, not for war.” They write that the
government could
use “eminent domain in a way that actually benefits people,” by using
college
dormitories, convention centers and hotels to house hurricane evacuees.
“Only
massive immediate Federal intervention can relieve the situation,” says
the
International Action Committee (linked to the Workers World Party) in a
September 1 statement. Noting that thousands of Louisiana and
Mississippi
National Guard troops are currently in Iraq, along with their Humvees,
refuelers
and generators, the IAC says: “They should be at home helping their
neighbors
recover from this disaster, not in Iraq maintaining an illegal
occupation.”
Such appeals for the government’s armed forces to serve the people
create dangerous
illusions in the forces of racist repression and the capitalist state
they represent.

In fact, the National Guard
troops are being brought back from Iraq, and they are now patrolling
New
Orleans like they did in Baghdad only a few weeks ago. “They have M-16s
and
they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot to kill...
and I
expect they will,” announced Governor Kathleen Blanco. Revolutionary
communists
would certainly not stand in the way of troops actually providing aid
or
helping rescue survivors. We support demands that decent facilities be
opened
for the use of the survivors, which will be a major issue in months to
come as
the “rebuilding” of New Orleans will undoubtedly be dragged out. But we
tell the
truth, that the capitalists’ army and police exist to repress
the
workers, black and poor people, and to protect the rich and
powerful. Reformists
beg the government of the class enemy to “do the right thing.”
Revolutionaries seek
to mobilize the black, poor and working people to act independently in
their
own class interests against the state power of their oppressors.

The wrenching
dislocation that Hurricane Katrina has set off could have profound revolutionary
consequences, if a revolutionary leadership
is forged to
lead the struggles of the oppressed. The tens of thousands of suddenly
homeless
black poor and working people ought to march on Washington itself, on a
class-struggle program counterposed to the segregationist nationalism
of
Farrakhan et al. The sight of thousands of unemployed homeless camped
out on
the ellipse and the mall in full view of Bush’s White House and the
Capitol,
recalling the hunger marches of the early 1930s, would send shivers
down the spine
of the ruling class. Demands should be raised for massive public works,
at full
union-scale wages and under workers control, to rebuild New Orleans in
the
interests of those who live and work in it, not the capitalist oil
corporations,
agribusinesses and tourist industry who have run Louisiana as their
private fiefdom,
in the process sinking its biggest city below the waters of Lake
Pontchartrain
and bringing doom to its inhabitants.

House speaker
Republican Dennis Hastert opposed spending billions to
rebuild New Orleans, a city which he said could instead be “bulldozed”
into
oblivion. This expresses the racist disdain of the right-wing yahoos
who, even
as they use the 9-11 World Trade Center attack as a battle cry for
their
terrorist “war on terror,” would like to “cut off New York City and let
it
float out to sea.” Their visceral fear and hostility is directed
against the
black, Latino, Asian, immigrant poor and working people who live in the
urban
centers and have the economic and social power to bring the rulers of
U.S.
capitalism to their knees. A magnificent city can be rebuilt in New
Orleans. It
is not true that this is impossible because much of the city is below
sea level
– just look at Amsterdam. But for that to happen a revolutionary
workers party
must be built, one that is internationalist to its core, to lead the
necessary
revolution in this country and around the world. Black workers would
play a
vanguard role in making such a party a champion and tribune of all the
oppressed.

The agony of New Orleans
has shown once again that black oppression is central to all politics
in the
United States. The civil rights movement, which stayed within the
“bourgeois-democratic”
framework, achieved only limited gains, and even those are constantly
being
undermined. It could not liberate black people from the poverty and
racism inherent
in the system of capitalist wage slavery. As Karl Marx wrote at the
time of the
Civil War, the second American Revolution, that abolished chattel
slavery: “Labor
cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black skin it
is
branded.” Today, fighting for revolutionary integrationism against the
racists
who lock up minorities in segregated ghettos and barrios, the
Internationalist
Group and League for the Fourth International call for all the
oppressed to
join the struggle for black liberation through socialist
revolution. n